The city hummed.

  Not with engines or footsteps, but with vibrations. Soft tremors of life beneath the skin of stone. You could feel it if you listened close enough.

  Everyone else could.

  But not Kai Auren.

  He stood at the edge of a rooftop, school bag slung over one shoulder, staring out across Rendhall, the southern Resonant District. Harmonic towers gleamed in the distance, etched with glowing lines of song-energy, each one echoing the pulse of their city's ancestry. Even the sky shimmered faintly with Reverb Veins, channels of invisible frequency.

  People were born into Resonance. It was in their blood, passed down like a melody through the generations. Every child awakened their ancestral Verse by the time they were twelve.

  Kai was seventeen.

  Still nothing.

  No vibration. No hum. No gift.

  Just silence.

  They didn’t call him that at school, not to his face, but he heard it whispered like a skipped note in a song. The Null. The One Without Echo.

  “Your family line must’ve been broken,” a teacher once said. “Or maybe your Verse was never meant to be heard.”

  The words never left him.

  He trained anyway. Practiced the basic forms, studied theory, learned the mechanics of Harmonic Flow, but it was all like trying to dance to a rhythm he couldn’t hear.

  He lived in a world composed entirely of music, and he was deaf.

  That afternoon, it was supposed to be a routine Grade-2 mission. Patrol, observe, and report any signs of Reverb Drift near an old subway line. The city had recently detected a distortion spike there, nothing major, just a possible frequency leak.

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  Kai wasn’t even on the mission roster.

  But when he saw the upperclassmen moving out, two juniors and a senior from the School of Resonances, he followed.

  Not because he wanted to prove anything.

  He just wanted to feel something.

  The subway station was dead quiet.

  Old posters peeled from the walls. Faint lines of residual Resonance glowed along the ceiling, flickering, unstable. Kai stayed in the shadows, watching the team set up a Veil grid. Their leader, a fourth-year named Kalin, moved confidently, drawing glowing lines in the air with her fingertip.

  Then something went wrong.

  A shriek tore through the tunnels. The walls trembled. The air turned sharp and metallic.

  Echoborn.

  It emerged from the shadows like a smear of living static, body twitching and folding in ways that defied biology. A corrupted bloom, warped by centuries of song-rot. Its face, if it had one, was split open, a jagged mouth of soundless screaming.

  The upperclassmen reacted fast. Kalin formed a Chord Shield, the junior boys launched Resonant Blasts, but the creature didn’t care.

  It moved like reversed music, skipping beats and snapping from one position to another.

  Within seconds, one boy was on the ground, body spasming. Kalin’s shield fractured.

  Kai didn’t even have time to scream.

  The Echoborn turned to him. It paused, head tilting like it was trying to hear him. Then it lunged.

  Everything stopped.

  A line of white light sliced through the air between them, sharp and effortless.

  The Echoborn’s body froze mid-motion, then shattered.

  The silence that followed was deafening.

  Kai looked up.

  She stood between him and the ruined creature, coat fluttering in the energy wake.

  Sora Lysielle.

  White hair, violet eyes like cut amethyst, and presence that turned the subway into a stage. She didn’t look at him, not at first. She stared at the broken pieces of the Echoborn with mild disappointment.

  “Didn’t even hit a second Bloom,” she muttered.

  Then her eyes flicked to Kai.

  “…You’re the Null, right?”

  Kai froze. “Y-Yeah.”

  She tilted her head, studying him. “That thing shouldn’t have noticed you. You don’t have a Verse. No frequency. No echo.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  Then she stepped closer and held out her hand.

  “But when it looked at you... it screamed. Like you were louder than anyone.”

  Later, the mission was classified. The students were cleared, the incident buried under paperwork.

  But Kai was summoned to the School of Resonances the next day.

  Specifically, to Head Conductor Sora Lysielle’s division.

  She looked him straight in the eye and said:

  “You don’t have a Resonance, Kai Auren. But you have something else. Something wrong. And I like wrong things.”

  She smiled.

  “Welcome to the school.”